


Jackie's Computer

by DameRuth



Series: Bliss [17]
Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Fluff, Humor, Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-03
Updated: 2020-06-03
Packaged: 2021-03-04 03:27:13
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,508
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24526852
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DameRuth/pseuds/DameRuth
Summary: Spin-off from "Jack's Clipboard" -- Jackie's new computer is up and running, thanks to the Doctor and Mickey but she's got a few backdoors into odd parts of cyberspace, and some features that don't come standard. Misc. Bliss!verse bits and pieces, similar in format to "Clipboard." (Author self-rating: PG for mild rudeness.){Continuing the Teaspoon imports, original posting dates 2007.06.24-2007.10.12; it didn't turn into the longer series I'd originally expected, but I still think it's a fun idea.]
Relationships: Ninth Doctor/Jack Harkness/Rose Tyler
Series: Bliss [17]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/14078
Kudos: 21





	1. Homepage

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> I'll freely admit to being somewhat influenced by Diane Duane's "Young Wizards" series here (particularly the *universal* universal remote that Kit's family uses to get galactic cable channels . . .), but I think this will go in quite original directions -- and besides, it was a very tenacious bunny this time around.

Jackie heard the familiar racket in the courtyard from her bedroom, and she hastily wrapped up the IM conversation she was having and logged off. She’d have to get back to loislane again — “she” had some interesting things to say . . .  
  
She was at the door of the flat just in time to open it at the first knock. There was Rose, smiling, with her usual bag of wash over her shoulder. Jack had a pen tucked behind his ear and a fat book and clipboard in hand, looking like a sexy accountant on his day off. Both of them gave her hugs and greetings before trooping into the living room, leaving the Doctor, whose crossed arms and sour expression didn’t invite a hug.  
  
Jackie gave him one anyway.  
  
He wriggled free like a pouty six-year old, and opened with a blunt, “Right, so let’s get this sorted.”  
  
He pushed past her, heading for her computer, and Jackie couldn’t resist tweaking him.  
  
“Never thought you’d be so fast to head for my bedroom,” she told him, dryly, as she followed.  
  
From the living room, laughter from Jack and an amused “Mum!” from Rose.  
  
The Doctor might have said something sharp back — but he stopped abruptly at the door to Jackie’s bedroom. “What’s _this_?” he asked, startled.  
  
Jackie looked around him at the little desk that held her computer . . . and the second table jammed up against it, and the new shelves she’d put up, all overflowing with gadgets and wires.  
  
“My computer,” she told him, in the tone of someone stating the dead obvious.  
  
“But . . .” he went into the room, squinting at some of the less-common attachments. “ _That_ should not be here!” he declaimed in a stern tone of voice, using a dramatically outstretched finger to indicate a small box covered in blinking lights.  
  
Then he added, in a much less authoritative — almost jealous — tone, “Where did you _get_ it?”  
  
“Mail order. You’d be amazed who takes PayPal nowadays,” Jackie told him, reasonably.  
  
The Doctor spun, to find her looking at him with twinkling eyes and a barely suppressed grin, biting the knuckle of one finger to keep from laughing. In that moment, she looked very, very much like Rose.  
  
While he gaped, Jackie dropped her hand from her mouth, and said with admirable composure, “The _real_ job was getting the USB adapter.”  
  
Then she lost it, and began laughing, helplessly. “Ooooh, the look on your _face_!”  
  
“Who helped you with this?” the Doctor asked, turning his head back and forth to look at the computer and then Jackie.  
  
“Who said anyone _did_?” she shot back, stung. Then she relented. “Mickey, some. But mostly I did it myself. It’s just parts, y’know. If I could figure out recordin’ with the video, I knew this couldn’t be that hard. And I found some _interesting_ things on the ‘net, when I went lookin’. You wouldn’t know anything about that, would you?” she ended in a tone of sugary sweetness with steel just underneath.  
  
A sullen mumble in response, and blue eyes glaring at her.  
  
Jackie glared back. “Speak up.”  
  
The blue eyes flared, and the Doctor’s face went hard as stone . . . and then crumbled, as he had the good grace to go a little shamefaced.  
  
He raked his hair back from his forehead as he glanced towards to the computer, and sighed. “Well, I did boost the broadband some — gave it a little extra oomph and all. If y’ tweaked it right after that, it’d give you galactic access, but I didn’t think . . .”  
  
“What, that I wouldn’t go lookin’? That I couldn’t _figure it out_ , ‘zat it? ‘Rose’s Mum, she’s slow, she won’t notice . . .’?”  
  
The Doctor was facing away from her, but she could see that shot strike home; his shoulders stiffened slightly . . . then his head dropped, and he said, without looking back at her, “Yeah, that’s exactly what I thought.”  
  
Before she could respond with the angry words that boiled up in her, he raised his head and looked at her. “Shoulda’ known better. Rose’s Mum. 'F anyone’d figure it out . . .” He gave her a slight half-smile, respectful, for once, and ooooooh, she could see what Rose saw in him, that was for sure . . .  
  
The smile faded. “Doesn’t change that you shouldn’t have this, though.” A threat, almost.  
  
“Well, I do.” Jackie crossed her arms, and dared him to do anything about it. “An’ I can tell you, it’s been useful — you know how popular you lot are, the three of you? Not just out there,” she raised her topmost arm to make a little waving gesture indicating the Universe at large, “but here, too?” She pointed at the floor, standing in for the Earth.  
  
The Doctor frowned. “Thought I told Mickey-the-Idiot t’ use that virus I gave him, wipe me off the net . . .” From his tone of voice, he was planning dark things if Mickey hadn’t followed through.  
  
“Oh he did, right enough — but just taking out what’s on the ‘net wasn’t gonna erase _you_ , y’know. People still remembered,” she tapped her temple for emphasis, “and when a site crashes, you can put it up again. Re-scan photos, type in paper documents again . . . takes time, but even a bunch of monkeys with keyboards can do it.”  
  
The Doctor had the grace — barely — to wince.  
  
“Some folks figured the virus meant they were on the right track, even, made ‘em work harder. So you’re right back where you started — and Rose is right there with you.”  
  
The Doctor looked at her, his face blank. If she hadn’t been so tautly angry, Jackie might have been scared, but she matched the Time Lord glare for glare.  
  
“You might be family now, but don’t you _dare_ try and tell me I can’t keep track of my daughter, and who’s keepin’ track of her,” she breathed.  
  
Stalemate. The Doctor broke first.  
  
“No, ‘s not my right,” he said in a low voice, looking at his boots, startling her. “’Specially not when it’s at least partly my doin’ that you know.”  
  
A new voice from the door made them both jump.  
  
It was Jack, frowning at his clipboard, oblivious to the tension he’d just walked into.  
  
“This is probably a rhetorical quesion,” he said, “but I’m guessing any potential wedding sites require indoor plumbing?”  
  
“”Zat a _joke_?” Jackie asked, frowning.  
  
“Riiight.” Jack made a note in the margin of his paper. “Carry on,” he said with a wave of his hand, still not looking up from his clipboard, as he spun on his heel and left.  
  
Jackie and the Doctor looked at each other.  
  
“'F you aren’t gonna stay on your high horse, y’gonna look at that homepage problem?” she said.  
  
“Yeah,” he said. “I’ll do that.” Then, his verbal pace picked up, and he frowned. “So what’s goin’ on again? You’re gettin’ YahooMars as your default homepage? It’s fifty years till Mars has their own Yahoo feed . . .”  
  
“Don’t I know it — been scared stiff I was gonna see the wrong thing, start one a’ them time thingies Rose was tellin’ me about . . .”  
  
“A paradox. Well, I’m not feelin’ anything like that . . .” The Doctor seated himself at the computer, then paused with his fingers poised over the keyboard. “Y’ didn’t go readin’ the news . . .?” he asked, in a tone of deep foreboding.  
  
“’Course not. Weeeellll . . . once,” she admitted. The Doctor’s head went up in alarm. “Didn’t make any sense though — just a load of rubbishy gossip about people I didn’t know, mostly. Once I realized what it was, I shut it down.”  
  
The Doctor blew out a relieved breath, and settled in to work, calling up the Internet connection — and there it was, the homepage in question.  
  
“Y’ can’t change it?”  
  
“Nope, tried.”  
  
“Huh.” The Doctor’s fingers flew over the keyboard, too fast to follow with the naked eye, spurning the mouse. “Neither can I. Any ideas what happened . . .?”  
  
“Well, I did download some shareware last week . . .”  
  
Jackie rested her hand on the back of the chair and bent forward so she could watch the screen while the Doctor worked.  
  
\--  
  
Some time later, Jackie entered the living room to find Rose and Jack snuggled up on the couch. Jack was reading in his book, and Rose had her chin resting on his shoulder reading along. A pile of neatly-folded clean laundry occupied one of the chairs.  
  
“Right, then,” the Doctor said, as he followed her in. Rose and Jack looked up inquiringly. “Call me if it starts doin’ that again — and be sure y’ scan any shareware first with that new setup . . .”  
  
“Will do. Oh, you’ll want this.” Jackie picked up a file folder from the side table. “It’s the high points of what I’ve spotted — there’s a CD in there, too.”  
  
The Doctor grinned. “Thanks, Jackie. S’ been an enlightenin’ visit.”  
  
“Strange man in my bedroom — anythin’ could happen,” Jackie deadpanned back. “Rose, love, let me help you get that packed . . .” She made a move towards the laundry. The Doctor already had his nose in the file folder’s contents, heading for the door as he read.  
  
Rose and Jack traded a look, and a shared thought through the link about _really_ needing to pump the Doctor for information later, and then went to help Jackie with the laundry.  



	2. How To Get Fifty Hits in Five Minutes

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> I'm sorry, I'm so sorry . . . but a meme about fictional characters writing fanfic has been going around LJ, and this is what formed itself around that idea in my subconscious. I wish I could say it was a sand-and-pearl situation but, well . . . I don't think _this_ story will get that appellation from anybody. o_O

Jack sat slumped comfortably at an angle in Jackie’s computer chair, his crossed ankles propped precariously on one corner of the desk. The keyboard rested in his lap, and he was hacking away with the confident, machine-gun rattle of an experienced touch-typist. It had taken him a while to adapt to a qwerty-style keyboard, but once he’d gotten the hang of it, he hadn’t looked back.  
  
Rose was sitting balanced on a stool borrowed from the kitchen, reading over his shoulder and wondering if it had been such a good idea to introduce Jack to the “Harry Potter” books after all.  
  
Certainly, it had been a mistake to tell him about fanfic.  
  
After a brief, bemused tour of the 21st century’s online communities, he’d decided he could do better, after a fashion.  
  
“Sirius and Remus?” Rose couldn’t help asking, dubiously, as the tale unfolded before her eyes.  
  
“Subtext, Rose. And did you _see_ them in the _Order of the Phoenix_ movie? They were totally into each other,” Jack told her, amused, as he paused to backspace and correct a typo.  
  
“Not like _that_ they weren’t,” Rose told him, dryly.  
  
Jack snorted in appreciation at her double entendre, and resumed his rapid-fire typing.  
  
Rose’s eyes began widening, and she bit down on one knuckle, trying to keep from commenting, but . . .  
  
“Can two people _do_ that?” she asked, aware that she sounded like a dewy-eyed innocent, rather than a sophisticated young woman with two — count ‘em, two — fiancés. All the same, what Jack was describing gave her serious pause.  
  
“Weeeeelll . . . ” Jack drawled, in a considering pause between sentences. He backspaced again, changed a few words around and added a comma. “At least one of you has to be double-jointed. But most of _them_ aren’t going to know that,” he added, nodding at the computer screen to indicate his online audience.  
  
“God,” Rose groaned. “This is so wrong. They’re children’s books . . .”  
  
“Yeah? That’s what I thought, but tell it to some of the folks on these websites,” Jack shot back, and began typing in earnest again.  
  
Rose bit her tongue and followed along . . . until she suddenly clapped her hand over her mouth to hold in a squeak of shock.  
  
“Jack!” she choked, removing her hand when he paused again to critically re-read the saga thus far. “I can’t _believe_ you just wrote that . . .!”  
  
“Well, hell, they’re both shapeshifters. Don’t see any reason not to make use of it as a plot point. It’s not like either of them is an actual animal. _That_ would be wrong,” he told her, a little primly. He corrected two more typos, and then the rolling chatter of the keyboard began again as he headed for the grand finale.  
  
By the time Jack triumphantly tapped in the final period, Rose didn’t even have to try and keep quiet. She literally could not think of anything to say.  
  
“All right,” Jack said, talking mostly to himself. “A quick spell-check . . . whups! Missed that one. Okay, looks good, let’s copy it, toggle, paste. Author’s notes . . . mmmm, I never know what to say on those, I’ll skip that. Rating — is NC-17 as high as it goes? Okay, then . . . it’s showtime, boys’n’girls!” He leaned forward and clicked the “post” button with the mouse.  
  
The screen blanked for a moment, then informed them that the story had gone up successfully.  
  
Jack set the keyboard back on the desk, and scooted the chair forward. A slightly evil, anticipatory grin was plastered across his face, and he ran his tongue along his teeth in unconscious imitation of one of Rose’s favorite gestures.  
  
Rose herself wore a very different expression, since she was half expecting some internet pornography branch of the Met to come bursting through her mum’s bedroom door at any second.  
  
“Ooookay,” Jack said. “It’s been thirty seconds . . .” He hit the “refresh” button on the browser. “Hey, ten hits, that’s not bad!”  
  
Two minutes later, the hit count stood at thirty-two, and there were sixteen reviews — fifteen of which were wild in their praise, and one which declared the anonymous author to be “a seriously sick basterd [sic].”  
  
Five minutes later, the tally reached eighty-nine hits, thirty-five reviews, and eighteen people adding the story to their “favorites” list.  
  
Jack leaned back in his chair and stretched his arms luxuriously above his head, with the smug look of a cat that’s just eaten six canaries in a row and washed them down with a bowl of cream. At the end of the stretch, he cracked his knuckles and swiveled his chair to face Rose.  
  
“Toldja’ I could break fifty hits in five minutes,” he said.  
  
Rose shook her head slowly. “Yeah, and you did it. But I swear, Mum’s gonna have a fit when she finds out what you’ve been writing on her computer.”  
  
“Are you kidding? When I asked if I could set up an account using her internet connection, she said I could — s’long as she got to read what I wrote.” Jack winked at Rose’s startled expression.  
  
“In fact,” he added standing up and stretching again, “I think I’ll go get her . . .”  
  
Rose tried, and failed miserably, to not picture her mother reading _that_ story.  
  
“Urgh,” she said, shivering as she slid down off her perch on the stool. “If anyone needs me, I’m gonna be in the TARDIS bleachin’ my brain."  
  
“Aw, are you sure?” Jack asked, pouting a little but with a wicked twinkle in his eye. “After this, I thought I’d see what I could do with a little _Supernatural_ fic . . .”  
  
Rose clapped her hands over her ears. “That’s _it!_ ” she yelled, "I don’t want to hear any more, and it’s gonna be bleach and a _scrub bush_ ”  
  
She stormed out of Jackie’s bedroom, followed by Jack’s delighted laughter.  
  
Fanfic and Jack. What an appalling combination.  



End file.
